The missing ingredient in marketing is empathy with the customer. Understanding your customer from their point of view - their window on the world. Get inside the mind of your customer! Musings on empathetic market research, marketing, product development, innovation.

Steven Johnson: Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of InnovationReally intrigued by the title. Fabulously diverse in examples. If you ever felt like a square in round world, this book will make you sing for joy because that's what life is about--growing, moving, evolving.... The book is much stronger for being in Science section and not restricted to business innovation alone.

Four Square: "With such little required equipment, almost no setup, and short rounds of play that can be ended at any time, it is a popular playground game."- Wikipedia

from http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/bt/work_cysmn.html"A crucial feature of Blast Theory projects is the ability to extend user and audience affect outside the game - rather than delimiting our consciousness to the sterotypical and virtual, the gameplay pushes us to understand aspects of ourselves, our communities and social responsibility." - RealTime Magazine, Dec '03/Jan '04

Can You See Me Now? is a game that happens simultaneously
online and on the streets. Players from anywhere in the world can play
online in a virtual city against members of Blast Theory. Tracked by satellites,
Blast Theory's runners appear online next to your player on a map of the
city. On the streets, handheld computers showing the positions of online
players guide the runners in tracking you down.

With up to 20 people playing online at a time, players can
exchange tactics and send messages to Blast Theory. An audio stream from
Blast Theory's walkie talkies allowed you to eavesdrop on your pursuers:
getting lost, cold and out of breath on the streets of the city.

[Many evolved out of performance art projects]...live-action role-playing. In a LARP, each participant takes on the role
of a character within the game, and the players interact with each
other "in-character." Different LARPs have different rules governing
interactions. For example, if two characters resort to combat with each
other, the fight may be resolved with rock-paper-scissors, or by
rolling dice. There's really no way to win at LARP -- the point is
simply to advance the ongoing storyline of the game, although each
character will have specific motivations and goals. There are likely
LARPs going on today that incorporate GPS or mobile phone technology,
making them true urban games.- How Stuff Works: Urban Games

"The fourth wall refers to the imaginary "wall" at the front of the stage in a prosceniumtheatre, through which the audience sees the action in the world of the play. - Wikipedia

"But what’s the role of the *creator* who created the game of chess?Or an MMOG?Or basketball? Or Facebook?

Their role is to create a WORLD– a themed
framework with a set of social morays and rules (that, oh by the way,
can be broken) within which audiences can and will do whatever they want..." - Jim Banister

static: "This month 8.9 billion
videos were viewed on Youtube, so there is no question that the
technology has percolated down to just about everyone, but the way that
we package and deliver this content to viewers has not changed since
1958. Linear television programming does not work for a world of
massively dispersed video creators." - Michael Rosenblum

"We have, in the past few decades, dessicated journalism. We have removed the art from it... [The video wall] is a kind of impressionism brought to video. Instead
of getting one linear video story, we are going to deliver a
pointillism of video... [-Michael Rosenblum via Ken Kobre] "The viewer should be
bathed in the video and 'feel' the sense of Newark as a community, as
well as seeing and hearing the multiple stories being told.... It is a tapestry of people and stories. ." - Michael Rosenblum

"Menard, who moved to New Orleans in July, used the Internet to ask
ambient music composers around the world to produce a piece of sleep
music for the nocturnal concert he was planning. He eventually received
96 somnolent samples from Brazil to Poland to Japan to New Zealand.

Menard said the samples include environmental recordings of water,
slowed down gongs, a baby cooing, city noises, and other "dense,
droney" sounds. He will mix and layer the samples DJ-style during the
concert, hoping to create a "giant sleep mash-up"... - Nola.com article

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery. - Francis Bacon (from quotes page at http://www.artquotes.net/masters/bacon_quotes.htm)

The oXygen site has all the familiar paraphernalia: a features and benefits list, a customers list, a bunch of articles and documentation. Yawn. OK, I should look into that, someday...

Meanwhile Paul, who's "merely" a user of oXygen, shows me and tells me what the tool does, and why he values it. The customers that the oXygen site lists are just names and websites that otherwise mean nothing to me. Paul, on the other hand, is someone I know. And even if I didn't know him personally, I could get a sense of the guy by absorbing the identity he's projected into his blog over time. So his recommendation feels personal.

Reading his commentary on the screen video he made, I hear the voice of experience and the ring of truth...

Very, very cool. It reinforces my hunch that the combination of easy-to-create blogs and easy-to-create narrated screen videos could put users in charge of software marketing, education, and training.

March 12, 2004

We didn't do any traditional research in the way of pre-testing advertising or even product pre-testing at Nike. A lot of lab work but nothing in front of focus groups, at least in the seven years I was there. We did -in lieu of that - get very close to consumers. We didn't jump in front of them in focus groups or other qualitative environments and say, "What do you think of this line?" or "What do you think of this commercial?" We would spend hours just getting to understand the world they live in, and then very slowly and methodically move it to a discussion about sports and fitness, then to a discussion about footwear and apparel, then to brands, and then ultimately to Nike.

Too often a lot of companies are saying, "Let's test the new package design," and just jump in front of consumers and say, "What do you think of this one, versus that one, versus that one?" when what they probably should be doing is having a very deep and insightful discussion about how they feel about the world they live in and where the brand fits or doesn't fit. -- Scott Bedbury, Author of A New Brand World (worked on Nike and Starbucks brands) in interview with Tom Peters

I have a dim view of conventional market research too...especially for innovative, disruptive products and services.

Tom Peters: You have a very dim view of market research. A number of times you say that you don't figure out how to create a new luxury item by going out there and talking to consumers.

Michael Silverstein, Author of Trading Up: The New American Luxury: The biggest problem with conventional research is that it works with the general population. It doesn't work with segments. If you go out to middle America and you say, "Imagine this," middle America actually has trouble imagining this.

What they don't have any trouble with is seeing something tangible and saying, "That's fantastic." But if, ten years ago, you had described a $38 bottle of vodka in a premium class and said, "Would you buy it?" the general population would have said no. In fact, 92 percent of them would have said no. If the marketers had listened to the market research, we wouldn't now have Belvedere, Ketel One, and Grey Goose.

There are segments for whom vodka is very important. And they will pay $38 a bottle, and they'll buy a better class of product, and will create a new $500 million segment. Conventional market research against the general population would never have identified that segment.

... branding isn't just about deciding on a clever "positioning." It's about nothing less than "who do you want to be?" And this isn't a function of data, market research and clever advertising. It's a function of the emotional connection a brand makes with its customers. Brand meaning runs deep, way below the superficial content of logos and taglines. Emotions rule!

For Tom [Peters], brand value has everything to do with uniqueness, and Tom's summary admonition/call-to-action, "Distinct or Extinct" gets to the heart of his beliefs about branding. And the emotional connection is the only way to find true uniqueness. Quoting Tom Chappell of Tom's of Maine: "You have to define yourself based on a point of view you care deeply about." After all, if you don't have passion for your brand, neither will your customers … or employees.
- From Tom Peter's website

March 03, 2004

At first I thought this was on from the author of this Emotional Branding book (which is fantastic!, but I'll write about that in another post). But it's not, it's this Emotional Branding book which I'm not familiar with (yet). However, looks very promising as well and I'll be there.

Developments in Market Research: It is Brain Surgery, After All
Speaker: Daryl Travis, author of Emotional Branding: How Successful Brands Gain the Irrational Edge and CEO of Brandtrust

It turns out that market research to determine the best branding strategies is brain surgery, after all. Because, to assess, then hone your branding strategy, you need to get inside the minds of your customers and understand how they feel.

What's really happening when consumers say one thing and do another? How often has conventional research failed to help you understand customers' emotions, which are critical to capturing competitive advantage — and determining your brand strategy.

Emerging right-brain research techniques will forever change the way we do research and tap into customer emotions, preferences, and behavior.

I was looking for the microcontent post in Joi Ito's blog for some research I'm doing when I read this snippet from a comment by Corbett Wall:

Do you ask a record company exec where the latest music is coming from? No way. You ask some kids in the scene. They know because they breathe it. It's the same for this kind of tech stuff. You have to play with it to know what's really going on. And eventually people will bank it, but by that time we'll be doing something else already.